Top 5 Traits of High-Performing Teams

DevOps is here and it seems to be what everyone in IT service management (ITSM) is buzzing about. So what are the goals and how do we know it’s not just the next hot kitchen color for this year? DevOps is a cultural and professional movement that stresses communication, collaboration and integration between software developers and IT operations professionals while leveraging agile, lean and traditional ITSM practices.

Stakeholders on the development side will include, but not be limited to, all of the people involved in developing software products and services. On the operations side it will include, but not be limited to, all of the people involved in delivering and managing those software products and services and the underlying IT infrastructure on which it is being delivered.

The goals are to better align IT responsiveness to business needs, smaller more frequent releases, reduce risk, increase flow, improve quality and reduce time to market. These can only be accomplished by understanding the entire value stream, including the lead times and cycle times of the different areas that make up your value stream.

Let’s take a look at the top five predictors of IT performance and see how engaging DevOps practices enhances our ability to become high-performing teams.

The peer review change approval process provides enhanced and effective communication. When technical teams hold themselves accountable for the quality of their code through peer review their performance increases, resulting in 200 more times frequent code deployments, according to Puppet Labs’ “2016 State of DevOps Report.” Allows for an on demand deployment (multiple, daily releases) structure.

Version control for all production artifacts. This provides a single source of truth for all changes. An integrated and automated tool chain along with practices such as continuous integration result in a three times lower failure rate, according to the report.

Proactive monitoring enables teams to diagnose and solve problems faster and have a higher degree of accountability. Tie that in with a single source of truth and that results in 24 times faster mean time to recovery (MTTR), the report noted.

High-trust organizational cultures allow for experimentation and learning, allowing people to take intelligent risks. Having this culture promotes the idea that repetition and practice is the prerequisite to mastery. According to the Puppet Labs report, organizations with high NPS (Net Promoter Score) have shown much higher levels of employee retention and are 2.2 times more likely to recommend their company as a good place to work.

A win-win relationship between Dev and Ops. It’s not Dev versus Ops, it’s Dev and Ops. Shifting left is about building quality into the software development process. When you shift left, fewer things break in production because issues are detected and resolved earlier. By building quality into the software development cycle, high-performing teams spend less time on unplanned work. We also found they spend less time remediating issues and spend more time on new, value-add work.

Everyone has migrated to cloud. All apps are containerized. And, we’ve all moved to serverless apps. That’s how it feels based on the buzz here in Silicon Valley. But, as the head of a DevOps consultancy that works with a range of clients, I can tell you reality is entirely ... Read More